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A symposium on the work of poet, painter, and critic Marjorie Welish
Slought is pleased to announce "Of the Diagram," a symposium on the work of poet, painter, and critic Marjorie Welish, on April 5, 2002, to be held at Slought and the University of Pennsylvania. The symposium will feature lectures and conversations by a variety of colleagues and collaborators in the arts, including Norma Cole, Deborah Gans, Carla Harryman, Bob Perelman, Thomas Zummer and others. By assembling art critics and literary theorists, poets and artists, architects and art historians in this way, the symposium manifests the many ongoing conversations in Welish's work.
Since the late 1970s, as a poet, painter, and art critic, Welish has cultivated a position of independence from fixed schools or tendencies and has premised her work on the relentlessly self-interrogative questions: What needs to be done now? What would be an art in consequence of that question? The criticality evident in her answers joins demanding inquiry with clever playfulness. She has constructed grammars of reflexive lyricism, "thought forms having to do with possible paradigms."
Although Welish encourages re-thinking classifications and codifications ("Tables of Contents of course are apparatus; they are supplements to books in certain ways, and yet they legislate"), this conference and the associated publication to follow orders contributions with the reader new to Welsh's work in mind.
Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, has contributed to several volumes on contemporary art, including Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, and Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Recent collections of poetry include The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2000) and Word Group (2004).
Welish is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the International Studio Program, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
In April 2002, Slought Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania produced a conference on her art and writing, the proceedings of which became Of the Diagram: The work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books, 2003). She exhibits her paintings with Baumgartner Gallery in New York, among other galleries.
